Wastewater and wishful thinking: Treatment plants to “revive” the Santiago River in Mexico

Abstract

This article grapples with issues of urban wastewater sanitation in one of Mexico's most polluted river basins, through an analysis of a river restoration project centered on the construction of municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Taking an ethnographic approach to the study of infrastructure, the main argument is that, beyond their possible contribution to reducing pollutant loads, in this context municipal WWTPs can best be understood through the concept of “duplication,” whereby the infrastructure works serve as a vehicle for the transfer of public resources to the private sector, through construction and operation contracts. At the same time, these plants also fulfill objectives related to their symbolic value, in this case as indicators of a commitment to resolving one of the state's main socio-environmental conflicts, while studiously avoiding its root causes, including industrial pollution sources. From an urban political ecology perspective, the paper also examines how investment in wastewater treatment infrastructure in the basin continues to reinforce social and environmental inequities, particularly for peri-urban communities along the Santiago River.

Ecological Emergency in El Salto and Cosmopolitical Aesthetics in Eugenio Polgovsky's Resurrección (2016)

“…There are no interviews with scientists, doctors, or politicians, no narrator and no intertitles (except occasional dates). Official discourses are present in the film only via the ironic insertion of a 2012 broadcast in which local government promotes its 'green' agenda -the 2012 installation of the 859 million peso 'El Ahogado' treatment plant that, despite being one of the biggest such plants in Mexico, does not treat heavy metals or many synthetic chemicals (McCulligh, 2022). Cindy McCulligh, a researcher who has published extensively on the pollution of the Santiago, describes how politicians use the instalment of wastewater treatment plants in the region for good publicity.…”

“…Cindy McCulligh, a researcher who has published extensively on the pollution of the Santiago, describes how politicians use the instalment of wastewater treatment plants in the region for good publicity. Such installations have a high ‘symbolic value’, but serve mainly to divert state funds to private treatment companies, whilst the plants, once installed, tend to be so poorly maintained as to be largely ineffective (McCulligh, 2022). The broadcast included in Resurrección features ‘Blue Marble’‐type images of the Earth, and other images that are examples of ‘Anthropocene Visuality’, which, as T.J Demos argues, functions to reinforce the idea that ‘we’ humans ‘have mastered nature, just as we have mastered its imaging’ (Demos, 2017: 28) and which the visuality of Resurrección as a whole contests.…”